Promotional water bottles make for an inexpensive and simple way to promote your business. Inexpensive because the people who receive them hold on to them for a long time, use them often. Simple because you put your logo and your message on them, give them to people, people read your message.
Promotional water bottles are not as popular as some other promotional products, say personalized coffee mugs. On the other hand, they’re more suitable for some occasion than those other, more popular items. For instance, if your prospects are gym goers, you might find promotional water bottles a better fit. If you and a gym facility decide to join marketing forces, then there’s no doubt that they are a better fit than promotional coffee mugs, for instance.
Here are 4 tips on how to use promotional water bottles successfully. (Matching event and personalized product is, by itself, insufficient.)
1. Bottles are promotional tools. That means you must make sure your business name, logo, website, or whatever other information you deem useful needs to be noticeable (bright colors) perhaps, but easy to read (no color clashes, no colors that blend into each other). Easy to read means easy to read from a few feet away. Yes, you hope that the person who gets the water bottle will become a client but that’s no reason to not try to get some of the people in whose presence he/she is going to use your water bottle don’t become clients, or, at least, curious about your promotional water bottle.
Perhaps it’s best to think of your promotional water bottles as your billboards. You want them to do what billboards do – just from a few feet closer.
2. Think about how and when you’re going to distribute them. Do you give them out at an event, from a booth? What else could you give at the same time? Are the people who give them away knowledgeable enough about your business? Are you giving them away in conjunction with a charity event? How do you do it (what’s the message on them, who gives them away (your people or the charity people)? What do they say when they give them away? This and the message must match the charity, the charity event must overshadow your company yet your company must be remembered as having participated in the charity event and for the products or services it sells.
3. You’re better off giving away 100 high-quality promotional water bottles then 1,000 low quality ones. This sounds like a no-brainer, a cliché; however, there are businesses out there who do give low quality. They might have good bottles but low quality personalization or the other way around. Or, worse, both are bad. Promotional products work because they get your name out inexpensively. AND because they create good feelings in the people who get them. If they don’t do that, they’re useless. If they create bad feelings (people thinking that cheap promotional water bottles means you must cut corners in all areas of your business, for instance), they work powerfully against you.
4. Include a “call to action” on every bottle. Calls to action could be an invitation to visit your website, or, better yet, a particular page on your website, not your homepage. It could be an invitation to call a phone number or to send a message to an email address.
If you’re planning to make use of promotional water bottles as marketing tools, always keep in mind the above tips.
By Dan Kennedy
